For reference, this started as this StackOverflow discussion and Clerbert asked me to move it over here. Long story short, here's what's happening.

I'm exporting a durable topic from JBOSS 7.1.1.Final and have several standalone clients that read the data off the topic. Things start wonderfully, all the clients read the data successfully for a time span of 2-5 hours and then they just stop. The server keeps pumping data onto the topic but the clients stop reading data--I ascertained this by looking at the server log file and didn't see any disconnnects logged on the server side and the clients would just record a log message saying "MESSAGE RECEIVED" at <timestamp> and nothing after that, they just stop working and I've got no idea why.

My best guess is that you didn't configure paging, configured the server to block when queue is full and have a dead subscription. I.e. you create a subscription (or a core-queue) and messages are building up.

I got PrintData to work, but I'm confused as to what I should be looking for with regards to a dead subscription. I see lots of Add and Update records logged, but no Delete or Remove actions in the logs.

However print-data won't tell you anything if your subscriptions are not persistent.

You should look for places where you are creating a subscription and not removing it. The server will keep sending messages to that subscription, and since you have blocking configured, the system will keep pushing data until the server is blocked.

You can configure paging, but messages will be leaking on that subscriptiong.